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Value

One of the more useful metaprogram is the hierarchy of value. On any topic you can determine which values are in the top 3. These are the values that the brain processes. All other values are filtered out.

The world which matters to us is only illusory, is unreal. – But the concept ‘really, truly there’ is one we drew out of the ‘mattering-to-us’: the more our interests are touched on, the more we believe in the ‘reality’ of a thing or being. ‘It exists’ means: I feel existent through contact with it. – Antinomy. To the same degree that this feeling produces life, we posit meaning in what we believe is the cause of the stimulation. Thus, we construe ‘what is’ as what exerts an effect on us, what proves itself by exerting its effect. – ‘Unreal’, ‘illusory’, would be that which is incapable of producing effects, yet appears to produce them. – Supposing, though, we put certain values into things, then these values have effects back on us after we’ve forgotten we were the ones who put them in. Supposing I think someone is my father, then much follows from that concerning everything he says to me: it’s interpreted differently. – Thus, given the way we comprehend and construe things, the way we interpret them, it follows that all the ‘real’ actions of these things upon us then appear different, newly interpreted – in short, that they exert different effects on us. But if all construals of things have been false, it follows that all the actions of those things upon us are felt and interpreted in terms of a false causality: in short, that we measure value and disvalue, benefit and harm, in terms of errors, that the world which matters to us is false. Fundamental solution: we believe in reason, but this is the philosophy of grey concepts; language is built in terms of the most naive prejudices now we read disharmonies and problems into things because we think only in the form of language – thus believing in the ‘eternal truth’ of ‘reason’ (e.g., subject, predicate, etc.) we cease thinking when we no longer want to think within the constraints of language, we just manage to reach the suspicion that there might be a boundary here. Thinking rationally is interpreting according to a scheme we cannot cast away.

Notebook 5, summer 1886 – autumn 1887 paragraph 19

One should at last put human values nicely back in the corner where alone they have any right to be: as personal little values. Many species of animal have already disappeared; if man disappeared as well, nothing would be lacking in the world. One must be enough of a philosopher to admire even this nothingness (- Admire nothing -)